EDITOR’ S QUESTION
At the end of April, Spain and Portugal experienced one of the most severe power outages in European history. About 55 million people were affected and it lasted more than half a day. People were left without trains, traffic lights, ATMs, phone connections and Internet access. It raises the question, is digital dependency an issue for companies? Cahyo Subroto, Founder at MrScraper, kicks off this month’ s answers below:
In my perspective, yes but not because digital systems are bad. But because too many companies forget that digital infrastructure is still physical at its core.
I’ m founder of an AI-powered data extraction platform that operates across multiple cloud providers and serves clients who depend on 24 / 7 data availability. I work with engineering teams every day to make systems faster, smarter and more scalable, but also more resilient, because the truth is that no system is immune to failure.
planning never accounted for the possibility that they could.
So yes, digital dependency is a concern, but only when it is blindly taken. The solution isn’ t to avoid digital tools. But to architect systems with awareness of their limits. That means planning for failure, using multi-region and multi-provider set-ups, building offline contingencies where possible and identifying the single points of failure in your process before they find you.
At MrScraper, we designed our infrastructure with the assumption that outages will happen. We distribute traffic across cloud providers, we cache critical jobs in-memory during slowdowns and we give users fallback modes when certain systems aren’ t responding.
That kind of design work takes time, and it isn’ t always visible to the end-user, but when something breaks upstream, and your product still works, that’ s when it shows its value.
Cahyo Subroto, Founder, MrScraper
For me, digital dependency becomes a liability when businesses treat cloud platforms, APIs and AI systems as infallible. People often assume that cloud-based means always available. But as the recent power outage in Spain and Portugal reminded us, every digital system is still rooted in physical infrastructure.
THE SOLUTION ISN’ T TO AVOID DIGITAL TOOLS. BUT TO ARCHITECT SYSTEMS WITH AWARENESS OF THEIR LIMITS.
Cables go down. Power grids fail. DNS services break. And when they do, businesses that have built their entire operations on the assumption of uninterrupted connectivity are the ones that suffer the most – not because digital systems failed, but because their
In my opinion, digital systems are powerful because they allow speed, scale and automation, but they only stay powerful if leaders remember that trust without redundancy is just risk in disguise.
For me, being digitally dependent isn’ t the issue. Being digitally unprepared is.
IS DIGITAL DEPENDENCY AN ISSUE FOR COMPANIES?
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